ποτὶ κέντρον δέ τοι λακτίζεμεν
τελέθει ὀλίσθηρος οἶμος.—PIND. Pyth.ii. 173.
“AT a young man’s feet.” The expression is vague, but there is good reason to believe that Saul was now not less than thirty years old.1 The reverence for age, strong among all Orientals, was specially strong among the Jews, and they never entrusted authority to those who had not attained to full years of discretion. We may regard it as certain that even a scholar of Gamaliel, so full of genius and of zeal as Saul, would not have been appointed a commissioner of the Sanhedrin to carry out a responsible inquisition earlier than the age of thirty; and if we attach a literal meaning to the expression, “When they were being condemned to death, I gave a vote against them,”2 this implies that Saul was a member of the Sanhedrin. If so, he was at this time, by the very condition of that dignity, a married man.3
But if the regulation that a Sanhedrist must be a married man was intended to secure the spirit of gentleness,4 the rule had failed of its purpose in the case of Saul. In the terrible persecution of the Christians which ensued—a persecution far more severe than the former attacks of the Sadducees on the Apostles—he was the heart and soul of the endeavour to stamp out the Christian faith. Not content with the flagging fanaticism of the Sanhedrin, he was at once the prime mover and the chief executor of religious vengeance. The charge which had cost St. Stephen his life must have been partially valid against others of the Hellenistic Christians, and although their views might be more liberal than those of the Galilæan disciples, yet the bonds of affection between the two branches of the Church were still so close that the fate of one section could not be dissevered from that of the other. The Jews were not naturally fond of persecution. The Sanhedrin of this period had incurred the charge of disgraceful laxity. The Sicarii were not suppressed; the red heifer was slain no longer;5 the ordeal of the bitter water had been done away, becausethe crime of adultery had greatly increased.6 Rabbi Joshua Ben Korcha, when R. Elieser had arrested some thieves, reproached him with the words, “How long will you hand over the people of God to destruction? Leave the thorns to be plucked up by the Lord of the vineyard.”7 But to the seducer (mesith), the blasphemer (megadeph), and the idolater, there was neither leniency nor compassion.8 By the unanimous testimony of the Jews themselves, Christians could not be charged with the crime of idolatry;9 but it was easy to bring them under the penalty of stoning, which was attached to the former crimes. The minor punishments of flagellation and excommunication seem to have been in the power, not only of the Sanhedrin, but even of each local synagogue. Whatever may have been the legal powers of these bodies, whatever licences the temporary relaxation of Roman supervision may have permitted,10 they were used and abused to the utmost by the youthful zealot. The wisdom of the toleration which Gamaliel himself had recommended appears in the fact that the great persecution, which broke up the Church at Jerusalem, was in every way valuable to the new religion. It dissipated the Judaism which would have endangered the spread of Christianity, and showed that the disciples had a loftier mission than to dwindle down into a Galilæan synagogue. The sacred fire, which might have burnt low on the hearth of the upper chamber at Jerusalem, was kindled into fresh heat and splendour when its brands were scattered over all Judæa and Samaria, and uncircumcised Gentiles were admitted by baptism into the fold of Christ.
The solemn burial of Stephen by holy men—whether Hellenist Christians or Jewish proselytes—the beating of the breast, the wringing of the hands with which they lamented him,11 produced no change in the purpose of Saul. The sight of that dreadful execution, the dying agonies and crushed remains of one who had stood before the Sanhedrin like an angel in the beauty of holiness, could hardly have failed to produce an impression on a heart so naturally tender. But if it was a torture to witness the agony of others, and to be the chief agent in its infliction, then that very torture became a more meritorious service for the Law. If his own blameless scrupulosity in all that affected legal righteousness was beginning to be secretly tainted with heretical uncertainties, he would feel it all the more incumbent on him to wash away those doubts in blood. Like Cardinal Pole, when Paul IV. began to impugn his orthodoxy, he must have felt himself half driven to persecution, in order to prove his soundness in the faith.
The part which he played at this time in the horrid work of persecution has, I fear, been always underrated. It is only when we collect the separate passages—they are no less than eight in number—in which allusion is made to this sad period—it is only when we weigh the terrible significance of the expressions used—that we feel the load of remorse which must have lain upon him, and the taunts to which he was liable from malignant enemies. He “made havoc of”— literally, “he was ravaging”—the Church.12 No stronger metaphor could well have been used. It occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, but in the Septuagint, and in classical Greek, is applied to the wild boars which uproot a vineyard.13 Not content with the visitation of the synagogues, he got authority for an inquisitorial visit from house to house, and even from the sacred retirement of the Christian home he dragged not only men, but women, to judgment and to prison.14 So thorough was his search, and so deadly were its effects, that, in referring to it, the Christians of Damascus can only speak of Saul as “he that devastatedin Jerusalem them that call on this name,”15 using the strong word which is strictly applicable to an invading army which scathes a conquered country with fire and sword. So much St. Luke tells us, in giving a reason for the total scattering of the Church, and the subsequent blessings which sprang from their preaching the Word in wider districts. The Apostles, he adds, remained. What was the special reason for this we do not know; but as the Lord’s direct permission to the seventy to fly before persecution16 would have sanctioned their consulting their own safety, it may have been because Jesus had bidden them stay in Jerusalem till the end of twelve years.17 If, as St. Chrysostom imagines, they stayed to support the courage of others, how was it that the shepherds escaped while the flock was being destroyed? Or are we to infer that the main fury of the persecution fell upon those Hellenists who shared the views of the first martyr, and that the Apostles were saved from molestation by the blameless Mosaism of which one of the leading brethren—no less a person than James, the Lord’s brother—was so conspicuous an example? Be that as it may, at any rate they did not fall victims to the rage which was so fatal to many of their companions.
In two of his speeches and four of his letters does St. Paul revert to this crime of an erring obstinacy. Twice to the Galatians does he use the same strong metaphor which was applied to his conduct by the Damascene believers.18 He tells the Corinthians19 that he was “the least of the Apostles, not meet to be called an Apostle, because he persecuted the Church of God.” He reminds the Philippians20 that his old Hebraic zeal as a Pharisee had shown itself by his “persecuting the Church.” And even when the shadows of a troubled old age were beginning to close around him, keen in the sense that he was utterly forgiven through Him who “came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief,” he cannot forget the bitter thought that, though in ignorance, he had once been “a blasphemer, and persecutor, and injurious.”21 And when he is speaking to those who knew the worst—in his speech to the raging mob of Jerusalem, as he stood on the steps of the Tower of Antonia—he adds one fact more which casts a lurid light on the annals of the persecution. He shows there that the blood of Stephen was not the only blood that had been shed—not the only blood of which the stains had incarnadined his conscience. He tells the mob not only of the binding and imprisonment of women as well as men, but also that he “persecuted this way untothedeath.”22 Lastly, in his speech at Cæsarea, he adds what is perhaps the darkest touch of all, for he says that, armed with the High Priest’s authority, he not only fulfilled unwittingly the prophecy of Christ23 by scourging the Christians “often” and “in every synagogue,” but that, whenitcametoaquestionofdeath, he gave his vote against them, and that he didhisbesttocompelthem toblaspheme.24 I say “did his best,” because the tense he uses implies effort, but not necessarily success. Pliny, in a passage of his famous letter to Trajan from Bithynia,25 says that, in questioning those who, in anonymous letters, were accused of being “Christians,” he thought it sufficient to test them by making them offer wine and incense to the statues of the gods and the bust of the emperor, and to blaspheme the name of Christ; and, if they were willing to do this, he dismissed them without further inquiry, because he had been informed that to no one of these things could a genuine Christian ever be impelled.
We do not know that in all the sufferings of the Apostle any attempt was ever made to compel him to blaspheme. With all the other persecutions which he made the Christian suffer he became in his future life too sadly familiar. To the last dregs of lonely and unpitied martyrdom he drank the bitter cup of merciless persecution. Five times—in days when he was no longer the haughty Rabbi, the self–righteous Pharisee, the fierce legate of the Sanhedrin armed with unlimited authority for the suppression of heresy, but was himself the scorned, hunted, hated, half–starved missionary of that which was branded as an apostate sect— five times, from the authority of some ruler of the synagogue, did he receive forty stripes save one. He, too, was stoned, and betrayed, and many times imprisoned, and had the vote of death recorded against him; and in all this he recognised the just and merciful flame that purged away the dross of a once misguided soul—the light affliction which he had deserved, but which was not comparable to the far more eternal weight of glory. In all this he may have even rejoiced that he was bearing for Christ’s sake that which he had made others bear, and passing through the same furnace which he had once heated sevenfold for them. But I doubt whether any one of these sufferings, or all of them put together, ever wrung his soul with the same degree of anguish as that which lay in the thought that he had used all the force of his character and all the tyranny of his intolerance to break the bruised reed and to quench the smoking flax—that he had endeavoured, by the infamous power of terror and anguish, to compel some gentle heart to blaspheme its Lord.
The great persecution with which St. Paul was thus identified—and which, from these frequent allusions, as well as from the intensity of the language employed, seems to me to have been more terrible than is usually admitted— did not spend its fury for some months. In Jerusalem it was entirely successful. There were no more preachings or wonders in Solomon’s Porch; no more throngs that gathered in the streets to wait the passing shadow of Peter and John; no more assembled multitudes in the house of Mary, the mother of St. Mark. If the Christians met, they met in mournful secrecy and diminished numbers, and the Love–feasts, if held at all, must have been held as in the early days before the Ascension, with doors closed, for fear of the Jews. Some of the Christians had suffered cruelly for their religion; the faithless members of the Church had doubtless apostatised; the majority had fled at once before the storm.26
It is, perhaps, to indicate the continuance of this active hostility that St. Luke here inserts the narrative of Philip’s preaching as a fitting prelude to the work of the Apostle of the Gentiles. At this narrative we shall glance hereafter; but now we must follow the career of Saul the Inquisitor, and see the marvellous event which, by one lightning flash, made him “a fasileApostle”—which in one day transformed Saul the persecutor into Paul the slave of Jesus Christ.
His work in Jerusalem was over. The brethren who remained had either eluded his search–warrant, or been rescued from his power. But the young zealot was not the man to do anything by halves. If he had smitten one head of the hydra,27 it had grown up in new places. If he had torn up the heresy by the roots from the Holy City, the winged seeds had alighted on other fertile ground, and the rank weed was still luxuriant elsewhere; so that, in his outrageous madness—it is his own expression28—he began to pursue them even to foreign cities. Damascus, he had heard, was now the worst nest of this hateful delusion, and fortunately in that city he could find scope for action; for the vast multitude of Jews which it contained acknowledged allegiance to the Sanhedrin. To the High Priest, therefore, he went—unsated by all his previous cruelties, and in a frame of mind so hot with rage that again it can only be described by the unparalleled phrase that he was “breathing threats and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord.”29 The High Priest—in all probability Theophilus, who was promoted by Vitellius at the Pentecost of A.D. 3730—was a Sadducee, and a son of the hated house of Hanan. Yet it was with Saul, and not with Theophilus, that the demand originated, to pursue the heresy to Damascus.31 Not sorry to find so thorough an instrument in one who belonged to a different school from his own—not sorry that the guilty responsibility for “this man’s blood” should be shared by Sadducees with the followers of Hillel—Theophilus gave the letters which authorised Saul to set up his court at Damascus, and to bring from thence in chains all whom he could find, both men and women, to await such mercy as Stephen’s murder might lead them to hope for at the hands of the supreme tribunal.32 In ordinary times—when that Jewish autonomy, which always meant Jewish intolerance, was repressed within stern limits by the Roman government—it would have been impossible to carry out so cruel a commission. This might have been urged as an insuperable difficulty if an incidental expression in 2 Cor. 11:32 had not furnished a clue in explanation of the circumstances. From this it appears that at this time the city was more or less in the hands of Aretas or Hareth, the powerful Emîr of Petra.33 Now there are notices in the Talmud which prove that Hareth stood in friendly relations to the Jewish High Priest,34 and we can see how many circumstances thus concurred to create for Saul an exceptional opportunity to bring the Christians of Damascus under the authority of the Sanhedrin. Never again might he find so favourable an opportunity of eradicating the heresy of these hated Nazarenes.